Contact Center Compliance


DATA ENHANCEMENT GUIDE

How to Get More from Your Contact Lists

Faced with external competition and internal demands to do more with less, many marketers are looking for ways to extract more value and utility out of data they already have. In this guide, you'll learn how the application of data enhancement methods to your contact lists can improve customer engagement, maximize your return on investment, and protect you from violations, consumer complaints, and opportunistic lawsuits.

Within this mobile-friendly guide, you'll discover how to:

  • Filter, contextualize, and add to existing data sets to maximize relevance and usefulness for business operations
  • Leverage current and enriched data to reach, convert, and retain more customers
  • Deliver fine-tuned personalized messaging and prioritize sales leads
  • Avoid TCPA compliance violations and other hazards

Experience this guide now.

 

DATA ENHANCEMENT GUIDE

Get More from Contact Lists with
Data Enrichment & Data Append

Businesses today are under constant pressure to increase consumer interest and engagement while simultaneously cutting back on sales and marketing expenses. Faced with external competition and internal demands to do more with less, many marketers are looking for ways to extract more value and utility out of data they already have. Data enhancement—the process of filtering, contextualizing, and adding to existing data sets in order to maximize their relevance and usefulness for business operations—is one way to leverage your data to reach, convert, and retain more customers.

We live in a golden age of data—businesses have access to reams of exclusive, detailed data sources covering a vast range of demographic, financial, and behavioral attributes, from the individual level to geographic and everything in between. Data enhancement allows businesses to deliver fine-tuned personalized messaging, develop reliable and effective methods for prioritizing sales leads, and improve customer engagement across all marketing channels.

Customer data, however, is constantly changing. When businesses make decisions based on outdated data, costs and inefficiencies tend to increase while the consumer experience is diminished.

For businesses that engage in marketing efforts subject to TCPA regulation, outdated or otherwise inaccurate data can be worse than inefficient. Every day, more than 100,000 telephone numbers are reassigned to new owners. If you call or text a reassigned number without the consent of its new owner, that is a TCPA violation that could subject you to costly fines or even a class-action lawsuit.

Data enhancement can significantly reduce this risk by updating and reconciling databases to ensure that they contain accurate, usable information. When data enhancement is performed with a mind toward TCPA compliance, reassigned numbers and other hazards can be avoided.

This guide will explore the ways in which the application of data enhancement—and more specifically data enrichment and data append methods—to your contact lists can improve customer engagement, maximize your return on investment, and protect you from violations, consumer complaints, and opportunistic lawsuits.

 

1

New Customer Acquisition

Engage & Convert New Prospects

Data enrichment and append can help you engage more effectively with new prospects, driving up your customer acquisition rates. Imagine that you have a single piece of inbound identity data: a name, a phone number, an email address. What can you do with that on its own?

You could cold call—or you could use data enrichment and append to validate and expand on what you have, turning a scrap of information into a detailed profile with more accurate, actionable intelligence behind it. Key identity elements, contact information verification, and other insights into preferences and behaviors are all potentially acquirable through data enrichment and append solutions. And of course, having verified the information, you don’t have to worry that a cold call will end up turning into an expensive breach of TCPA rules.

When you have access to more accurate data about your customers, you can know immediately who’s at the other end of the phone calls, emails, and any other communications you’re sending. You can then segment those communications and include personalized messages for better engagement.

Even when you aren’t directly engaged in marketing outreach, data enrichment and append benefits you by filling in gaps and reducing inaccuracies in your CRM database.

Verify & Score Inbound Leads

Data enrichment and append can also identify the inbound leads with the highest ROI potential and turn unknown leads into identified prospects. Just a single unit of identifying data can be leveraged to identify, verify, and score leads, allowing you to craft personalized, relevant messages for whoever is at the other end of a sales inquiry—and it does so in a fast and cost-effective way.

Contacting the wrong person is a futile waste of time at best. At worst, it can be a costly TCPA violation that damages your brand reputation. Identity verification is a data enhancement process that minimizes this risk by trying to match up key identifiers (name, address, mobile number, landline number, email) and assigning scores to both the lead and the individual data elements. A high score indicates a high degree of confidence that the lead’s information is accurate.

With integration through an API or IVR, identify verification can be performed in real time, providing what amounts to a one-click solution for verifying and scoring leads and maximizing the value of every dollar you spend on lead generation.

Along with identify verification, data enhancement can involve identity completion and identity enrichment as well. By filling out a skeletal customer profile with up-to-date contact details and lifestyle data (such as demographics, location, interests, buying habits, home and vehicle information, and devices used) you can segment, analyze, and take more effective actions related to persona-based marketing and write highly specific personalized messages that speak directly to your leads’ top concerns.

Complete Inbound Leads

It’s not uncommon to obtain incomplete or inaccurate information about inbound leads you’re gathering. Contacting them on the basis of flawed identity data can lead to errors and missed opportunities to engage and convert these leads.

Data enrichment and append can salvage these flawed or partial records by providing the information needed to render them complete and reliably accurate. Identity verification can be used to score and validate the accuracy of the information you do have. Identity completion fills in the important blanks and provides you with current and comprehensive contact information. Finally, identity enrichment completes the picture with additional actionable information about the lead.

With data enrichment and append, you can go from fragmentary customer information to a full customer profile. With attributes such as buying power, demographics, and lifestyle at your fingertips, you have a solid basis for lead qualification, segmentation, routing, and personalization. This allows you to make intelligent predictions and implement major improvements to your lead engagement efforts.

Enable Increased Reach

With highly detailed profiles and a comprehensive, personalized marketing strategy, converting leads can feel as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. But what if you’re stuck with a small barrel and not very many fish? Data enrichment and append can help with that too, by expanding your marketing reach to increase the number of potential prospects you can target.

The on-demand demographic, geographic, and behavioral information from data enrichment and append can show you how to locate and identify promising new prospects who are actively seeking out the products or services you offer. By giving you the information you need to find these leads, you can extend your marketing omni-channel into new territories and gain a better ROI on your customer acquisition endeavors.

2

Customer Relationship Management

Engage Customers & Enrich Relationships

Looking to connect with your customers on a more meaningful level and create experiences that they’re more interested in engaging with? Once again, data enrichment and append may be the answer.

The data sitting in your CRM may be an untapped hoard of valuable, actionable insights and information that can be used to elevate your marketing intelligence, target leads with pinpoint accuracy, and build compelling, personalized messages and experiences—if you can validate and complete it with data enrichment and append.

Identify & Score Inbound Customers

When you receive an inbound customer inquiry, you’re starting from a strong position from the get-go: you’re dealing with a customer who’s already interested enough to seek you out. Now imagine how much more effective your messaging and follow-ups can be when you can approach that conversation with accurate knowledge about who that customer is and what’s really motivating them.

Data enrichment and appand can verify the identities of the individuals behind these inquiries, score them, and provide you with insights you can immediately use to better reach that lead and address their main points of interest or concern. With integrated, real-time validation and scoring, you have a way to seamlessly update the information in your CRM and immediately act upon the updated, enhanced customer data.

That same information can be leveraged later in the customer’s life cycle to address future inquiries and improve retention initiatives.

Complete, Enhance & Link Identities

One situation you always want to avoid is failure to recognize a customer. Not only does this usually result in a bad customer experience, it means you’ve missed an opportunity to strengthen your relationship with that customer.

With more comprehensive, up-to-date customer information readily available, you are far more likely to positively identify a returning customer and bolster your relationship with personalized messages and tailored experiences.

Positively identifying customers can be challenging at times—they may change employers, locations, even names—but the lead scoring methodologies that data enrichment and append solutions employ can take a fragment of a customer profile and match it to other records, or provide you with the missing information in real time.

Identity enrichment takes thus further, building on the core identifying data with relevant customer attributes and marketing intelligence. All of this information can then be leveraged to create better customer experiences, up-sell with special offers that are directly relevant to their interests, and maximize both the value you’re providing and the return on your CRM investment.

Enrich/Append Identities

The customer information that is relevant to your marketing endeavors can change from day to day. What’s irrelevant during one business cycle can be absolutely crucial the next, when market forces and consumer demands shift.

If you’re needing to know things about your customers that weren’t part of your initial data-gathering efforts, data enhancement can ride to your rescue once again. You can not only enrich your customer data, but append it with new information—who donates to charity, who holds long-term investments, who the early tech adopters are, or anything else that might be extractable from the wealth of demographic and lifestyle data that can be pulled in.

And just like with identity enrichment, appended data can be tied in with just a single customer identifier from your contact list, filling in the gaps—however many there are—and painting the full picture you need to see in order to make your omni-channel marketing strategy successful.

Cleanse & Normalize Identities

As we briefly touched on above, customer identity is not always a fixed, persistent thing. Many different aspects of a customer’s profile can change over time, one piece at a time. The longer a customer profile stays in your CRM, the greater the chance that it has become outdated and inaccurate.

Data enrichment and append can cleanse and normalize these customer records, updating them with the newest and most accurate name, company, and contact information accessible. A single submission of your CRM file to this process can return a file that has been thoroughly updated and ready to be mined for leads and insights to drive your marketing and retention activities.

3

Risk Mitigation

Protect Against Fraud

Fraud, identity theft, and data breaches are serious concerns for every business, especially those involved in e-commerce. These days, every passing year breaks the online fraud record set by the previous year, with over 16 million victims and $16 billion stolen in 2017, according to the Insurance Information Institute.

Part of the reason for the constant increase is that hackers are always improving their tools and methods, adapting to every protective measure and security patch that gets put up to stop them. To combat this threat, businesses need tools that are just as sophisticated and effective.

Data enrichment and append can play an important role in your fraud prevention strategy by enabling you to verify, along multiple vectors of identifying data, just who is at the other end of your communications. When a fraudster is posing as a legitimate customer, a data-enhanced CRM can give you the information you need to tell whether or not they are who they claim to be. Data enrichment and append doesn’t just provide contact information for marketing, but also dates of birth, IP addresses, even social security numbers.

This information can be scored, along with known fraud indicators, to let you know how likely it is that a customer’s identity is authentic—and how risky it would be to take them at their word. Data enrichment and append can also provide you with strong fraud evidence, such as the use of a recently deceased person’s information.

With real-time identity verification and the capability to search for warning signs of fraud in your CRM, you can spend less time on manual review processes, make fewer costly inquiries to credit bureaus, and reduce the risk of exposure to both your customers and your business.

Ensure TCPA Compliance

In 1991, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, or TCPA, went into effect. Among other things, the TCPA prohibits companies from making autodialed, non-emergency robocalls without the recipient’s consent. In 2013 and 2015, the laws were updated to account for the specific nuances of wireless phone technology. Consent is also required to call numbers on the national Do-Not-Call list, regardless of line type.

Businesses that place these calls to customers without verifying their identities, whether the phone is landline or mobile, or confirming that consent has been obtained risk violating the act and incurring severe penalties—up to $1,500 per incident. When the right lawyers catch wind of repeated violations, failure to comply with the TCPA can subject companies to multi-million dollar class action lawsuits. Just ask Dish Network, Wells Fargo, Caribbean Cruise Line, or any other company that has been forced to pay a massive settlement.

When your customer data has been validated with data enrichment and append, you can feel much more confident that you won’t accidentally call someone on the do-not-call list, or worse, a professional litigator. Every day, 100,000 phone numbers are reassigned to new owners. Taking a faith-based approach to avoiding TCPA violations is inadvisable—it’s much safer to use data enhancement to verify number status straight from the carrier source, match them to their owners’ names, and confirm that the consent status you have on file is up to date.

This type of validation can be done on-demand, via an API or batch transactions, or with perpetual monitoring of your entire CRM file. This way, you can ensure the best possible chances of full TCPA compliance before you start texting customers or making business calls.

Improve Omni-channel Collections

One area where data enrichment and append will immediately show improved results is in omni-channel collections. The more accurate your contact information, the more you can be assured that you’re contacting the right people, through the best possible addresses and phone numbers, and delivering consistent and effective collections messaging.

Even if you only have a single or partial identifier to start from, data enrichment and append processes can build up that single unit of information into a complete profile that can guide your entire collections omni-channel—in real time, on demand.

Data enrichment and append can locate bankruptcy filing notices, family member contact information, alternative contact information, and other data with specific applications in collection efforts. It can also help you to maintain a persistent identity for individuals in your CRM who pose a fraud or default risk, even if they attempt to evade detection by changing some of their identifying details.

With enhanced data, you can make more effective omni-channel collection outreach attempts, ensure that you won’t be calling any numbers that might incur TCPA violations, and recover more of the debts you are owed.

The Right Experts With The Right Solutions

When you’re trying to improve your customer engagement and prospecting initiatives, flawed or incomplete data can harm the experiences you’re trying to create and reduce your operational efficiency. Add in the financial implications of business waste and the risk of fraud and costly compliance violations, and the simple act of communicating with consumers in a direct and personalized way can feel pretty daunting. That’s understandable—businesses today need accurate and complete data in order to make informed decisions, create compelling customer experiences, operate more efficiently, and defend themselves against external threats. Luckily, there are expert solutions ready to lend a helping hand. The right specialists, working flexibly with and around your existing internal processes, can tackle both the overarching strategy and the granular details involved in creating comprehensive customer profiles for more effective marketing, sales, and retention efforts. That leaves you free to focus on your business operations without worrying that devastating fines or lawsuits could wipe you out without warning.


At Contact Center Compliance, we provide a full suite of data solutions to identify, verify and score your contacts and enrich/append missing or incomplete information to enhance your records. This solution encompasses all of the data enrichment and data append options discussed above, helping our clients to increase right party contact rates (and ROI), reduce business waste, and mitigate compliance and other risks.

With this solution, you can centralize all of your data needs with a single vendor. As a trusted tier 1 data and compliance provider, we have access to data portals that help our clients improve data hygiene for compliance, fraud, and identity verification. Whether you need high-end skip tracing or marketing demographics such as purchase power score appended, we have you covered. Concerned about fraud? We provide real-time right party contact verification.

We offer quick on-boarding and turnaround times, flexible monthly and per-job scalability and real-time support for every level of data enhancement. Additionally, you can get real-time updates and increased efficiency from our enterprise-level integrations with leading CX providers.

With over 20 years of proven success and 0 violations, fines, or lawsuits incurred by our clients, you can trust our experts for all your data and compliance needs.

If you'd like to learn more about how we can help your business minimize exposure to DNC and TCPA compliance risk and threats, request a consultation with one of our experts today.